Remember the good old days, when you actually learned something in college, and were practically guaranteed a job after you graduated?! Ahh, the good ol’ days!

Not anymore.

Not only are there no jobs, even if there were, graduates are wholly unqualified for them. But one thing is for sure: college tuition isn’t getting cheaper.

“…over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars.”

So much for America’s “investment” in education. But look at college costs in comparison to government. (emphasis added)

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.

College has long been an elaborate ruse whereby students believe there is some guarantee of a good job and a happy life. But two institutions are happy: the government who fleeces the taxpayers under the guise of “educating the children,” and the colleges and universities, the beneficiaries of this larceny.

The idea is to get people to believe in higher education, and convince them that colleges and universities are the only places to get them. Look at the numbers.

Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college. While the college-age population has not increased since the tail end of the baby boom, the percentage of the population enrolled in college has risen significantly, especially in the last 20 years. Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has increased by almost 50 percent since 1995. As a consequence, while state legislative appropriations for higher education have risen much faster than inflation, total state appropriations per student are somewhat lower than they were at their peak in 1990. (Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today.)

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

The only people getting a real return-on-investment from education are the bureaucrats who are selling this racket. Anybody asking for more money to go to education should be prosecuted under the RICO Act.

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